Holding down the dark end of the spectrum of ideas about human life is not easy. The problem is not that evil and suffering does not sell -- it sells a lot better than virtue and glory though no one cares to admit it. The problem is that to REALLY describe the end of the continuum that continues on only into Hell, you have to go there and take notes. Some go there but can’t remember, never write anything down. “I alone escaped to tell you” is the phrase of the witness, not the real victim.
What does death feel like? We look at ravaged bodies and wonder. But death doesn’t feel like anything. When you are dead, you don’t suffer because you are gone. Suicidal people think they will go somewhere else, but they are wrong. They simply won’t be anywhere anymore, ever again. They will not be looking down from Ghostville. Nor will they be, as Mary Roach in her book “Stiff” suggests we sometimes think, dressed in their best, lying peacefully on padded satin while pretty music plays, destined to sleep peacefully that way underground for the rest of time. Death is not the darkest thing.
Rather it is suffering that is so dark as to be almost inconceivable, because real suffering is in the brain, not the tissues of the body and leaves little room for understanding. It is often the idea of the damage, the emotional content, that is the real torture. So in African heart-of-darkness soul-destruction, it is not hacking off the forearms of children that is most painful to them -- it is forcing them to kill their family members. South American drug-cartel torturers specialized in the ingeniously inconceivable -- such as the important man whose punishment was the delivery of his daughter’s corpse who seemed to be pregnant, but whose abdomen really contained the head of her fiance.
In a way, with a desperately resourceful mind, one could transform that ghastly metaphor by reframing it to be the woman’s visceral embrace of her lover as though he were their child, their joy at being so intimately merged in death. This thought would likely be beyond the ability of the father of the woman. Reversal on that scale might be a phenomenon that is addressed to those whose brains have been rewired to interpret pain as intimacy or who have become numb to anything less intense. Or so I would guess. The most effective torture is not the obvious pain, but rather the creation of emotional involvement through personal confrontation and shrewd story-telling, role-playing at a psychodynamic level, twisting the knife in the living brain, fisting dreams.
The suffering of empathy, forcing one to watch the suffering of another, especially a loved one, like the mother confined in a cell just out of reach of her infant as it died of starvation, is so horrific as to render her into a zombie -- but without ever physically touching her. This is the darkness imposed on Jesus, his family and his friends. It is not the nails in his hands, the wound in his side, the crown of thorns or the gradual suffocation -- it is his empathy for those who -- sharing his suffering secondhand -- still do not turn away. And yet the sharing of the darkness was the entering edge of light. Theologians say.
In acting class I once took on the role of the messenger in the Greek drama who comes to report to Medea that the poisoned cloak she sent to kill Jason’s princess bride has done its work. I never reached an adequate portrayal of witnessing and testifying, because really understanding what it would be to confront that writhing young woman in agony would have mean activating my own real empathy. It’s not just a brain response, but the kindling of the autonomic nervous system into a shared tissue-deep revulsion: not just screaming, but gagging, puking, skin-crawling, cramping total reaction. In fact, an actor should “go there” only in rehearsal in case one is seized by actual excreta ejection as is part of the fear/flight/freeze complex. Onstage in performance, a convincing imitation is good enough -- but how can one know what that’s like without going all the way at least once? Or remembering having done it. Or watched such a messenger. This is the heart of the theory of “Method” acting.
When writing or painting or sculpting, there is at least the distance of interpretation that any art media requires, so that Guernica doesn’t realistically show the splashing dismemberment caused by bombs and is stronger for it. Even films meant to promote indignation and political action, and therefore intensifying the closeup details, run the risk of making us callous, curious, and maybe even unbelieving of anything less cruel. We cross over from the pity for children bombed to the near-hilarity of cartoons, unreality. Just now we are beginning to question the humanity of killing people without ever seeing them -- WWII bombs fell where they would, on friend and foe alike -- but today we kill accurately little figures on a green screen relaying satellite or drone info, maybe as infrared heat images, while onlookers in an office in Indiana sip coffee and express satisfaction. Actually moral alienation.
Artists have been trying to restore us to horror and consciousness by exhibiting the literally carnal, wearing dresses of meat, keeping pickled sharks in formaldehyde aquariums, and showing alien monsters whose multiple fangs drip with KY jelly. It doesn’t work. At a certain point we say, “Oh, that’s fake.” We snort. We laugh. We go make a sandwich.
The poetry and politics in the artistic portrayal of darkness in human life depends in part (alliteration is a way I make a little distance, thank you for noticing it) on admitting that joy and beauty exist somewhere else. Otherwise, doubt is cast on the observer, as a hopeless cynic, a fanatic Cassandra, even if that person is also a victim of all the suffering they describe. It’s necessary now and then to “go out of one’s mind,” even if you have to use chemicals. Dionysus begs you.
In the course of the American prairie clearances the indigenous people suffered deeply and darkly. Two strategies keep distance: one is demonizing them as sub-human and non-Christian so therefore not worth any sympathy. The other is romanticizing them as impossibly noble -- figures of myth -- more purified and poetic than any human could be. Strangely, in the way that cultural group-brains work, the two polarities were then mingled, entirely pushing out the actual, truly existing, humans living on the next block. To witness THEIR suffering would demand action, so we try to just not know. But then we use the same strategy on criminals and addicts. They are the devil; they are saints -- both at once.
“Not knowing” reality is euphemizing the euthanasia of compassion, eliminating the meaning and shared witness that people can create by changing things. It is a paralysis, a denial, a hell on earth. The alienation of meaning can be the worst torture of all. But the only way to get to the new meanings is to suffer -- some will even die. It’s hard to bear.
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